“Now my friends, the press is faced with quite a different problem… They are about to run out of ink.”
And here we are at Iron Man 2, the internet whipping boy of Marvel films. Its plot is held together by tattered strings!!! The third act is total garbage!!! The dialogue doesn’t even take itself seriously! Iron Man makes bathroom jokes!!! They should have paid Terrence Howard whatever he demanded!!! Was that Walt Disney playing Tony Stark’s dad?!!!
This is the movie the haters come out in droves for (but still all own on Blu-ray) and many involved have promised to redeem with Iron Man 3. I still vividly remember my reaction when I first saw it in theaters – I flipping loved it! I thought it was better than the first film in almost every way and two of the most solid hours of pure entertainment I had ever spent inside of a movie theater. I was sure that it would be the blockbuster to beat for summer 2010.
I was also wrong. It just took me three years to arrive at that conclusion. Iron Man 2 is not quite any of those bits of hyperbole I initially felt, and is by almost any criteria the weakest installment of Marvel’s Phase One. But it is not a terrible film. In fact, while I now freely acknowledge that it is inferior to the first Iron Man, the sequel is still my personal movie of preference for Jeremy Renner-less Iron Man action. Yes, a lot of the dialogue is ridiculous and the movie constantly winking at you about just how silly it is gets tiring by the end, but it also does quite a lot right. Hidden in the goofy dialogue are some pretty genius lines (almost always from Stark or Justin Hammer) and for its often aimless scripting, it zips right along and never feels flat like the first film occasionally does.
Fun fact: DJ A.M. was here once.
What I think went wrong with Iron Man 2 stems from its place within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger all serve a specific purpose in propelling their title characters toward a grander endgame: The Avengers. Iron Man 2 is somewhat different in that all of Tony Stark’s Avengers seeds were sewn up at the end of the first film, so regardless how much character development he goes through in the sequel, he’s still just treading water until the other super heroes are ready. I may be wrong on this as it is simply conjecture, but I get the feeling that there was not originally a plan for a second Iron Man film prior to The Avengers. Each of the four heroes would get their intro film and then team up in the fifth entry. But then the enormity of Iron Man’s success caught everyone off guard and Marvel did what any smart, successful studio would do and shouted, “We need more money now!”
Look at where Tony Stark is at the end of both Iron Man and Iron Man 2. Sure he’s learned a bit more about himself as a person after the second film, but he is both literally and figuratively in exactly the same place at the end of both films. That’s what this movie boils down to: it is a placeholder.
Even though Justin Theroux‘s script was severely hampered by coinciding with the writers’ strike, I do credit him for making such an entertaining spectacle out of a movie that exists only to keep its titular hero warm for a couple of years. Virtually every scene and character is memorable for one reason or another, and he takes the theme surrounding the morality of weapons manufacturing from the first film to a logical, timely, and poignant next step. Gary Shandling’s smarmy Senator Stern calls Tony Stark out for not turning over his suit technology to the government while there are enemy nations currently trying to duplicate it that could eventually threaten America. Stark over-confidently exclaims that anyone else is at least a decade or more away from achieving it. Then Mickey Rourke as Ivan Vanko shows up with it days later, almost kills Tony, and Senator Stern is all too quick to shove it in his face.
I love the dynamic here. We want to and are supposed to believe Tony and despise anything Stern says, but if we look at it through the lens of reality instead of cinema, Stern is actually kind of right. This exact scenario is playing out right now in the world of military aircraft. In 2009, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates shut down production of the costly F-22 Raptor stealth fighter because he and others in the Pentagon “knew” that anyone else was at least fifteen years away from building anything competitive. Fast forward four short years to 2013, and there is not just one, but THREE competitive stealth fighters flying out of China and Russia that, if history is a precedent, will likely be sold to nations hostile to us. Using our Iron Man analogy, maybe Tony Stark really should have turned over his tech to the government? Interesting to ponder.
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